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Sunday, 2 February 2014

Lessons about depression from the life of poet and hymn writer William Cowper

William
Cowper (1731-1800) was the leading poet of the evangelical revival in the
18th century. He was also for a brief period associated with our
church in St Albans and was converted within 50 meters of the front door.

In 1763 Cowper suffered a severe bout of depression. His
brother John placed him into the care of Dr Nathaniel Cotton who ran a private
hospital in his house known as the Collegium Insonorum which stood on the
corner of what is now College Street and Lower Dagnall Street.

Dr Cotton was a great friend of Dr Samuel Clark, the
minister of the chapel in Dagnall Lane where our predecessors met before our
present church building was erected (the current building is just around the corner
in Spicer Street so one walks past the site of Cotton’s home walking the 60 or
so metres from one site to the other).

Dr Cotton used to leave Bibles opened at strategic places
around the house and in this way it was in reading Romans 3:25 that Cowper was
delivered from the gloom of terror and despair to comfort and delight in
knowing Christ ‘whom God hath set forth
to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness
for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God.’

Cowper described his reaction: ‘Immediately I received the
strength to believe it, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone
upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed
in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of His justification. In a
moment I believed, and received the gospel.’

Later he was to pen such hymns as ‘God moves in a mysterious
way’ and ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’ which are still sung in many
churches today.

But Cowper’s conversion did not mean that he was permanently
delivered from his depression. In fact he suffered four serious episodes
throughout his life and attempted unsuccessfully on several occasions to commit
suicide. He often suffered periods of profound doubt and after a dream in
1773 believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation.

It is not difficult to identify possible triggers to his
illness. Cowper’s mother died when he was four years old and his father, with
whom he never had a good relationship, sent him shortly afterward to boarding
school. Later he was prevented by his uncle from marrying his cousin Theodora,
with whom he was very much in love and had enjoyed a close relationship for
five years. He never saw her again and neither of them ever married although
she secretly supported his work financially through an intermediary. And he
lived at a time when the clinical treatment of depression was far more
rudimentary than it is now.

After leaving St Albans Cowper moved to Huntington where he
was to meet Mary Unwin, later widowed after her husband was killed in a fall
from a horse, and John Newton: former slave-trader, pastor and author of the
hymn ‘Amazing Grace’.

Unwin and Newton took Cowper under their wings and were a
wonderful support to him in the years to come, enabling him to function to the
level he did and grace us with his legacy of wonderful poetry and hymns.

Recently, on a long run, I listened again to John Piper’s excellent
reflections on Cowper’s life, ‘Insanity
and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a Saint’.

I highly recommend the audio (I have listened to it several
times already), but particularly wanted to recommend Piper’s six ‘lessons’
about mental illness in Christians, and to add a seventh of my own.

1. We can all fortify
ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust
of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of his
pessimism. But we have seen that Cowper is not consistent. Some years after his
absolute statements of being cut off from God, he is again expressing some hope
in being heard. His certainties were not sureties. So it will always be with
the deceptions of darkness. Let us now, while we have the light, cultivate
distrust of the certainties of despair.

2. We must love
children and keep them close to us and secure with us. John Newton lost his
mother just like Cowper. But he did not lose his father in the same way. In
spite of all the sin and misery of those early years of Newton's life, there
was a father, and who can say what deep roots of later health were preserved
because of that. Let us be there for our sons and daughters. We are the crucial
link in their normal sexual development and that is so crucial in their
emotional wholeness.

3. May the Lord raise
up many John Newton's for us, for the joy of our churches and for the survival
of the William Cowpers among us and in our churches. Newton remained Cowper's
pastor and friend the rest of his life, writing and visiting again and again.
He did not despair of the despairing. After one of these visits in 1788 Cowper
wrote: ’I knew you; knew you for the same shepherd who was sent to lead me out
of the wilderness into the pasture where the Chief Shepherd feeds His flock.’

4. In the very
research and writing of this lecture I experienced something that may be a
crucial lesson for those of us given to too much self-absorption and analysis.
I devoted about three days from waking till sleeping to William Cowper, besides
leisurely reading of his poetry up till that time. Those three days I was
almost entirely outside myself as it were. Now and then I ‘came to’ and became
aware that I had been absorbed wholly in the life of another (which)… seemed to
me extremely healthy… For the most part mental health is the use of the mind to
focus on worthy reality outside ourselves.

5. The first version
of this lecture was given in an evening service at Bethlehem Baptist Church. It
proved to be one of the most encouraging things I have done in a long time.
This bleak life was felt by many as hope-giving. There are no doubt different
reasons for this in the cases of different people. But the lesson is surely
that those of us who teach and preach and want to encourage our people to press
on in hope and faith must not limit ourselves to success stories. The life of
William Cowper had a hope-giving effect on my people. That is a very important
lesson.

6. Let us rehearse the
mercies of Jesus often for our people, and point them again and again to the
blood of Jesus. These were the two things that brought Cowper to faith in 1764.
In John 11 (the story of Jesus and Lazarus) he ‘saw so much benevolence, mercy,
goodness, and sympathy with miserable men, in our Saviour's conduct, that I
almost shed tears’. And on the decisive day (of his conversion) he said, ‘I saw
the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood,
and all the fullness and completeness of His justification’.

And my seventh point? Don’t take feelings, dreams and
‘revelations’ too seriously, but rather test them all by Scripture. Cowper was
best when he took God at his word, trusting his sure promises in the Bible,
rather than placing his trust in his fickle feelings and a dream which it
sounds had its origin in the depths of his wounded psyche or in the pit of hell
itself.

As the Apostle Paul reminds us, ‘If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny

Himself’ (2
Timothy 2:13).

Our eternal security lies ultimately in the faithfulness of
God. Although we may feel at times like baby monkeys clinging on to God for
dear life through the storms of our existence - at any moment at risk of losing our grip
- our real situation, regardless of how we might feel, is more like that of
baby kittens secure in the faithful grip of their mother’s jaws.

2 comments:

I think God can speak to you through dreams and revelations. They often have a different 'feel' to them than normal thoughts/dreams. Like you feel an unusual sense of peace or you wake up feeling a particular sense of alertness when a dream is a warning. Some dreams or 'messages' from God can speak right to our heart and be very healing for those who are in such a deep depression they can't be reached any other way. But I agree, it's not a good idea to go looking for them or to start reading things into ordinary dreams or feelings.

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Kiwi, Christian and Medical

This blog deals mainly with matters at the interface of Christianity and Medicine. But I do also diverge into other subjects - especially New Zealand, rugby, economics, developing world, politics and topics of general Christian and/or medical interest. The opinions expressed here are mine and may not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or anyone else associated with me.

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I am CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organisation with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members. The opinions expressed here however are mine, and may not necessarily reflect the views of CMF or anyone else associated with me.